Emile Zola

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work."

Birthplace

Paris, France

Education

He studied at the Lycée Saint-Louis, twice failing his baccalauréat because of poor results in his French exams.

Other jobs

Zola worked as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department of the Louis Christophe Francois Hachette publishing house. He was also a literary columnist and art critic.

Did you know?

Zola was fired from his job at Hachette in 1865 when his racy autobiographical novel, La Confession de Claude, attracted the attention of the police.

Recommended works

Therese Raquin, L'Assommoir, Germinal

Influences

His early writing borrowed heavily from the Romantic movement, but as his naturalistic style developed he was more influenced by science than by art. Inspired by Claude Bernard's Introduction to Experimental Medicine (1865), Zola tried to adopt scientific principles in observing human relations. His belief in scientific determinism was articulated most clearly in the 1880 work, Le Roman Experimental.

Now read on

Guy de Maupassant, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adaptations

A total of 34 adaptations of his work have made it to the screen. The 1937 biopic The Life of Emile Zola won three Oscars.

Recommended biography

Zola: A Life by Frederick Brown

Criticism

Zola will be forever associated with two things: firstly, the forefront of the naturalistic movement, which attempted to remove artifice from fiction and replace it with "documentation", the acute observation of real life. Secondly, his authorship of a letter to the newspaper L'Aurore entitled 'J'Accuse', in which he petitioned for the release of Jewish soldier Albert Dreyfus, sparking a scandal that rocked France.